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Saturday, April 12, 2014

Music Video Review: 5 Seconds of Summer (5SOS): She Looks So Perfect

I have a brain full of thoughts and an infinite number of characters to express them. Lets begin shall we?

First Thought: Pretty teenage boys. What a shock. One can't hold their looks against them, but one can at least hope for a decent song to back the typical boy band looks with the video. That request barely goes fulfilled; the song is decent at best, and one can rattle off at least a dozen names that could pull off this song better (if they wanted to dare touch this toxic piece of teenage power pop).

Second Thought: At least Lorde has garnered some respect for teenage artists. Teenage artists are stamped with a "pop" label the moment they step into the music business, and can't crawl out of it unless they have very explicit ideas of who they want to be as artists, and more articulately an original sound. 5SOS has a pop centric sound with a few electric guitars to make them somewhat pop-rock. Maybe they want to shed the pop label to their name so their name doesn't instantly put a sour taste in the mouths of straight men everywhere (Ala Justin Bieber), but nobody is buying it with this track.

Third Thought: They're way too young to be singing the line "She looks so perfect standing there, in my American Apparel underwear."All of them are currently between 17-19 years old, and everyone knows that teenagers of that age are sexualized, no one is trying to degrade that. However, their fan base is going to be years younger than that, maybe even 7-8 years old. Putting a hyper-sexualized idea of what a teenage or High School relationship should look like is not a healthy image for pre-teens and middle schoolers across the world to be absorbing.

Fourth Thought: This has all been done before. Hardly anything here is original, they're pretty teenage boys singing pop rock music, playing instruments, and writing their own songs. So they're basically the Australian Jonas Brothers or One Direction? Cool. The only thing that 5SOS has that the others don't is a hyper-sexualized song and video as their debut single. Congrats.

Overall, not happy to see this. I'm sure teenagers across the globe will love it for expressing some of their sexual frustration and raging hormone levels, but a song this weak isn't cutting it.